coletta@hpcmsrb.HP.COM (Mary Coletta) (04/15/89)
Hi there!
I was curious to the usage of Un*x in the realm of Business Applications.
There appears to be consensus that Un*x does not support Business
Applications primarily because it can not handle a large number of
simultaneous users. A large number of users would be greater than 100
people at a time. Response time that is expected, would be less than
5 seconds for normal transactions (database update, addition, etc).
If you have had experience with large on-line
UN*X applications that support many users at the same time,
I'm looking to you for knowledge! Please send me your answers
to the following questions. I would really appreciate your
sharing your practical experience with me:
1) Briefly describe the application
2) On which machine does it run?
3) What is the average number of users at one time?
4) What is the average response time?
5) What is the most number of users at one time?
6) What is that respective response time?
7) What is your opinion of Un*x's performance with large on-line
applications that have many users?
8) Where do you work, and what's your position?
Thank you, Mary Coletta coletta@hpcmsawcs@cbnewsh.ATT.COM (william.clare.stewart) (04/22/89)
In article <35490001@hpcmsrb.HP.COM> coletta@hpcmsrb.HP.COM (Mary Coletta) writes: } I was curious to the usage of Un*x in the realm of Business Applications. } There appears to be consensus that Un*x does not support Business } Applications primarily because it can not handle a large number of } simultaneous users. A large number of users would be greater than 100 } people at a time. Response time that is expected, would be less than } 5 seconds for normal transactions (database update, addition, etc). The basic problems aren't UNIX itself: - UNIX used to only run on smaller machines - people who built software for the mainframe environment wrote code that only ran on IBMish systems, so when UNIX started to become available on big machines, they already had billions and billions of lines of non-portable COBOL that they liked. - The terminal handling environment on traditional IBM mainframes was very unfriendly, but it moved a lot of work off the CPU into terminals and cluster controllers, making CPU use efficient. Most UNIX applications are designed for friendly, CPU-intensive interaction, which doesn't always scale well (like vi or emacs), or are based on the older paper-TTY terminals (ed is very efficient, if not "user-friendly".) Neither are required. I've been on Amdahl mainframes with several hundred people doing generic software development, mail-reading, troff, etc. performance is fine. The largest number of users on *any* machine that I've heard of is >1000 people on the AT&T 3B4000 machines used for the French Teletex applications (these are exceptional - all the users have their little 300-baud terminals typing in cooked-mode, so almost everything is done by the I/O boards without even bothering the CPU, and the work fits very well into the 3B4000's non-shared-memory multiprocessing model.) You can do realistic traditional business applications just fine on UNIX on mainframes, or even on your HP 850's :-). You have to look at the amount and complexity of terminal I/O, the number and complexity of DBMS transactions, etc. - a mainframe is fine for fill-in-the-blamks on 3270s, but if you want instant verification and response to every keystroke it just won't cut it. } 8) Where do you work, and what's your position? AT&T Bell Labs, Government Systems Integration Department, or some title about like that. We look at a lot of government bids on large messy jobs. -- # Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs 2G218 Holmdel NJ 201-949-0705 ho95c.att.com!wcs # "If it weren't for us, American troops would be invading exotic places like # Lebanon and Grenada, and the Air Force would do stuff like bombing Libya" # Abbie Hoffman, R.I.P